Slow USB cable
Don’t trust the cable guy
TLDR; Slow drive was actually a dodgy USB cable.
For the past couple of years I have had an external SSD drive I use for all my day to day work.
Its a 250Gb Samsung that has served me well for the day to day photography and occasional video work. I don’t do larger projects so I can easily fit on a couple of photo jobs or a video project or 2 with proxy files, assets etc.
The one thing that got me was the speed of the drive.
It was abysmal at best but I just gritted my teeth and bared with it for ages.
I even did a bunch of tests to see where the bottleneck was with BlackMagic’s disk speed test.
Yes, 38Mbps..
Horrible.
In comparison, my Drobo gave me 157Mbps Write and 206Mbps read
No I didn’t just give up, I actually ran tests and documented the drives.
I swapped out the USB Hub, I tried it daisy chained with other drives. I rebooted with the SSD plugged in and without on different ports and in safe mode etc. Every thing!
Below are a couple of the tests for reference.
But still I got crap performance except for one test where the speed went up to something like 200Mbps.
Was that just a fluke? Did my eyes deceive me? Insert joke about the cat drugging me. But no, other than that one strange time, it was just a slow drive. Maybe I didn’t read the spec’s and got a POC.
At that point I did give up and just used the drive for years. Recently i had to upgrade my working drive to something with more space for some video work. So I went with a Sandisk 1TB that does read/write at 1000Mbps. I figure it will last me longer when I get a new laptop and I can get a better speed out of it.
391Mbps read and 409Mbps write. Nice. Waaaay better than before and the discrepancy of the advertised 1000Mbps is probably down to it being an old bus or something. I can live with that.
Then something tweaks in my head.
The only thing I didn’t change with my tests was the cable.
But a USB cable either works or it doesn’t right?
Hummm, a vague memory pops into my head of CRC error correction and retransmission over degraded communication lines…. Na…but then again…
Replace cable, re-run test.
Mother fucking cunt! That was it! A bloody cable has driven me crazy with slow speed for a couple of years now!
So that is now in the bin and I am a little wiser. Dont trust the cable fellow human people.
